Adobe has released the next major version of its professional photo workflow …

Adobe launched Lightroom 4 on Tuesday, a major upgrade to its digital photography workflow solution. Improved RAW processing helps squeeze out every last bit of dynamic range from today's DSLRs, while new features include GPS tag mapping, photo book creation, and improved support for digital video files. All the improvements also come with a 50 percent price cut, lowering the bar of entry for avid photo amateurs.

Lightroom 4 quickly went from public beta release in January to finished app in just two months. "Feedback from our customers is invaluable in developing Lightroom, and the real trick to a great release is to combine these insights with Adobe's unrivaled image processing innovation," Adobe vice president of Creative Media Solutions products Winston Hendrickson said in a statement.

Those image processing innovations include improved RAW processing designed to maximize detail in shadow and highlight areas. Squeezing every last bit of dynamic range from digital sensors has been a challenge, but Adobe promises that the new RAW processing engine can deliver better results at the extremes. Additional improvements have been made to the automatic contrast and exposure controls, and photographers can now selectively apply local noise reduction, moiré, and white balance adjustments.

Adobe has also added some tools that copy prominent features in Apple's Aperture 3. A new Map module can display images tagged with GPS data on a map, can associate GPS data with named locations for more sorting options, or can add geo-tagging to images via map lookup. Adobe also included a new Book module to create photo books directly within Lightroom, utilizing Adobe's well-known type controls and a variety of templates.

Perhaps most useful, though, is the addition of native video support in Lightrooom to handle the increasingly sophisticated video capture of today's DSLRs, compact cameras, and smartphones. Basic playback, trimming, and frame capture options are included, as well as the ability to add many of Lightroom's adjustments to video footage. Edited clips can be exported to non-linear editing software, or uploaded directly to Facebook or Flickr (but apparently not YouTube).

Lightroom 4's most popular feature, however, may prove to be its new lower price point. Adobe dropped the price from $299 to $149, which we suspect is a response Apple's aggressive price drop for Aperture 3, which now sells for $79.99 via the Mac App Store. Users upgrading from previous versions of Lightroom can pay just $79 (down from $99 for previous upgrades). The new low price should make Lightroom more accessible to serious amateurs or even casual shooters looking to improve workflow and organization of large libraries of digital photos.

Ars has a full review of Lightroom 4 in the works, so keep an eye out for it in the near future.

I really like this new development sensibility that Adobe has displayed with Lightroom.

Couldn't agree more. While I'm not going to rag on Adobe as seems to be all the rage with the kids these days as I use the CS suite professionally 8-10 hours a day, there's a coherency and intelligence to the development of Lightroom that is positively... non-Adobesque. It feels like software created by a much smaller, much hungrier, much less politically and emotionally stupid company. And I really don't think it has anything to do with competition from Aperture since Apple has so successfully mis-managed and semi-abandoned that software, as is their want sometimes. It's not like Adobe would have to try very hard to dominate the market, and yet it seems like they are giving it their best effort, which I appreciate. As a Mac user I could have freely chosen Aperture's admittedly excellent OS-integration, or Lightroom's more cross-platform aesthetic, and I embraced Lightroom years ago and haven't looked back. Looking forward to getting the 4.0 upgrade.

Interesting - I've been contemplating moving from Aperture, sadly. Apple seems to have semi-abandoned the software again, and despite the leaps and bounds in functionality they added in Aperture 3.0 the community behind it is rather quiet. Plugins, adjustment presets, etc all seem much more readily available for Lightroom.

I may run LR in parallel for a bit and see if it's worth the huge amount of time it would take me to migrate everything over.

What advantages does Lightroom offer over Aperture 3? I use Aperture at home but keen to know what, if anything, I'm missing out on.

Believe it or not, I think the interface on Lightroom is more thoughtfully done than Aperture's. I used both several years ago before settling on LR. It is, IMO, easily the best product that Adobe makes.

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I bought an early version of Lightroom and it was basically an infinitely more expensive version of Picasa with much slower performance.

Really, that's what you think? Clearly this is not the software for you.

I bought an early version of Lightroom and it was basically an infinitely more expensive version of Picasa with much slower performance.

Really, that's what you think? Clearly this is not the software for you.

So what am I missing? The storage features were pretty nice, although I didn't use them because they were too slow. The RAW editing features were below Canon's Digital Photo Professional. The cataloging was ok, but not that great.

I've been an Aperture user since it first came out.. I bought a Mac Pro just to run it. From time to time I would download Lightroom and compare/contrast but have never jumped. It's always pissed me off because Lightroom's performance seemed so much better and it has always seemed to have the advantage on output quality. (Although Aperture 3 got a lot closer.)

With this release I am moving to Windows+Lightroom. The price drop helps a lot since I had to build a new machine, even if it is much cheaper then if I'd bought another Mac. I've never gotten much mileage out of either the faces support or maps support in Aperture, but it sure is nice to see this version of Lightroom has book support, as I ordered quite a few books through Aperture.

But the biggest thing is the soft proofing.. hallelujah! LR4s soft proofing looks fantastic. I generally did not print from Aperture for anything critical since it's soft proofing and printing were so buggy and/or deficient. For any large prints I'd end up doing a painstaking process in Photoshop. LR4 looks like it takes all the options that were in PS CS in a confusing manner and were generally missing/incomplete from Aperture, and puts them all into a UI that is better then the PS CS one.. It looks like it will be a be a joy to use.

Migration is going to be an interesting project.. It will be a lot of work but I will be glad when it is done.. Apple really doesn't give me much confidence that they are going to stay behind Aperture in the long term. Price dumping it in the app store has been bizarre, there never seems to be much communication, and the community just isn't there like it is for Lightroom.

What advantages does Lightroom offer over Aperture 3? I use Aperture at home but keen to know what, if anything, I'm missing out on.

They're similar, but I'd say the biggest advantage that Lightroom 3 and 4 have over Aperture is it's excellent noise removal. There are some shots that I've had to take at 6400 and above that were saved with just using Lightroom 3. I'd rather use the built-in functions on a program like Lightroom instead of using a 3rd party plug-in that may or may not fit in the non-destructive history. Some plug-ins require you to save out a TIFF file before something is applied.

That's one advantage. And I never got my head wrapped around the way that Aperture does things. I basically just use Lightroom now as kind of a "super-bridge" in that I process all my RAW files in Lightroom, then bring them into Photoshop for final retouching/processing...if it needs it.

The storage features were pretty nice, although I didn't use them because they were too slow

What are you running it on, a netbook? I'm not even using a SSD and LR is among the fastest pieces of graphics-oriented software in my arsenal. Speed has never been an issue. This is on an i5-based iMac.

There's nothing wrong with Canon DPP's output, to be sure, but the UI is such a train wreck I find it hard to understand how anyone can take it seriously. Although there's always Photo Mechanic, a favorite of every pro photo journalist I know, and it's just as clunky, so what do I know.

Auto-Magic Face Tagging Please! Even facial recognition (i.e. this photo has three people in it to be tagged) would be a welcome addition. My understanding is the first step toward universal tagging is to get everyone to agree on a region definition standard in the metadata (i.e. Aperture, Picasa, Windows live photo gallery all do it differently)

Is LR4 capable of monitoring a folder for changes and updating automatically? This is a feature I see in hundreds of freeware music players etc, but not in a semi-pro photo software costing hundreds of dollars? When i delete a file or folder in explorer, why can't LR just remove it, rather than having to re-sync the whole thing or manually removing it? That is quite pathetic.

Could we please keep the unnecessary and off-topic knee-jerk reactions out of this thread? As far as I know, Adobe has never released an app for Linux. I'm sorry for it, but that's the way it is. I wish it were the case that "cross-platform" meant more than "runs on Windows and Mac" but that's the state of a great deal of commercial software. There's no reason to hold Lightroom especially accountable.

Price dumping it in the app store has been bizarre, there never seems to be much communication, and the community just isn't there like it is for Lightroom.

This is the App Store model. Lower prices to increase sales. There's nothing mysterious about it. They don't have to print boxes or manuals or DVDs. To my knowledge, all of the software packages bought or produced by Apple have had drastic price cuts over the years.

Aperture 3 has annoyed me so many times.. Unresponsive UI.. "Import" has failed to import stuff from my sdcard (happened only once...couldn't replicate. That's scary, as you never know when it will strike again).. Geotagging post-import is tricky, as it's hard to drag & drop one group of photos into a particular location where you already have existing photos. Very kludgy UI there.

It seems to have improved, but still occasionally spazzes out on me. Still, I'm more of a high-end amateur user, not a pro photographer, so I'm not sure if I could be convinced to spend another $150 on my photo library software.

I bought an early version of Lightroom and it was basically an infinitely more expensive version of Picasa with much slower performance.

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Does the new geotagging feature support importing GPX tracks and synching with image timestamps? I'm using Geosetter right now and it's pretty good, but would be nice if LR supported that as well.

Lower price is awesome!

raistlin52 wrote:

Auto-Magic Face Tagging Please! Even facial recognition (i.e. this photo has three people in it to be tagged) would be a welcome addition. My understanding is the first step toward universal tagging is to get everyone to agree on a region definition standard in the metadata (i.e. Aperture, Picasa, Windows live photo gallery all do it differently)

Picasa does this, and I find it really annoying and privacy-breaching. I don't want face tags to be available online with my pictures.

I think around version 1, it was fair to see it as not much more than a slow expensive version of Picasa. Which was enough for me at the time, since I wanted to manage my photos from Mac OS and Picasa wasn't available for Mac OS at the time.

Since then, it's come a *long* way. It's gotten faster, more featureful, and the RAW processing is amazing. At this point, it's not at all accurate to call it a slow expensive version of Picasa.

I also agree that LR is the best Adobe product, and displays a remarkably different design and development sensibility than the rest of their software.

Is LR4 capable of monitoring a folder for changes and updating automatically? This is a feature I see in hundreds of freeware music players etc, but not in a semi-pro photo software costing hundreds of dollars? When i delete a file or folder in explorer, why can't LR just remove it, rather than having to re-sync the whole thing or manually removing it? That is quite pathetic.

That's a feature, not a bug. Many Pro's use removable drives to store work on a per-project or per-client basis and want to keep the catalog available without having the files necessarily available.

So what am I missing? The storage features were pretty nice, although I didn't use them because they were too slow. The RAW editing features were below Canon's Digital Photo Professional. The cataloging was ok, but not that great.

There's a huge gap in editing capabilities between Picasa and LR, and the LR noise reduction is much better. Picasa doesn't even support editing of RAW files (which is the whole point of LR/Aperture). In fact, it's the worst mass-market software you could think of using for RAW because it has a terrible RAW converter (dcraw). At least iPhoto piggybacks off the RAW support that Apple builds for Aperture.

I'm not saying that an app like Picasa or iPhoto is the wrong choice for you, just like I wouldn't say that WordPad or TextEdit is the wrong choice for someone who doesn't need the extra features of Word. But I certainly wouldn't claim that Word is just "an infinitely more expensive version of WordPad with much slower performance"!

I bought Lightroom 3, only to abandon it. I downloaded Lightroom 4, only to abandon it as well.

I just don't get it really. I use the Adobe CS products for more than just photography, so maybe that's why I don't see the value. Other than the speed which it finds and catalogs my photos, I find it confusing and limited (feature-wise). It also automatically pops up whenever I insert a USB stick, external HD, or CD, whether or not that device/storage has pictures on it. I also hate how it wants to automatically organize my file system. Stop that!!

It doesn't even do facial recognition, which would be the #1 reason for me to buy it. I use Picasa to find pictures of people, and that's free!

Better RAW handling? Isn't that same engine in Photoshop? If you're a serious photographer, wouldn't you already have this?

Better RAW handling? Isn't that same engine in Photoshop? If you're a serious photographer, wouldn't you already have this?

I suspect there are a lot of people who own LR but not Photoshop. I've owned every version of LR but didn't have a copy of Photoshop until last month (and the only reason I have it because my company has a site license). But perhaps I wouldn't meet your definition of a "serious photographer."

I bought Lightroom 3, only to abandon it. I downloaded Lightroom 4, only to abandon it as well.

I just don't get it really. I use the Adobe CS products for more than just photography, so maybe that's why I don't see the value. Other than the speed which it finds and catalogs my photos, I find it confusing and limited (feature-wise). It also automatically pops up whenever I insert a USB stick, external HD, or CD, whether or not that device/storage has pictures on it. I also hate how it wants to automatically organize my file system. Stop that!!

It doesn't even do facial recognition, which would be the #1 reason for me to buy it. I use Picasa to find pictures of people, and that's free!

Better RAW handling? Isn't that same engine in Photoshop? If you're a serious photographer, wouldn't you already have this?

I guess if they sped up Bridge most would have zero reason to use it.

LR does essentially everything I need to do with my RAWs without me having to spend $700 for Photoshop. I can do lens correction, tone curve, NR, WB, and sharpening all in LR. The number of times I've really wanted to reach into Photoshop since using LR a few years ago numbers less than ten. And I'd rather spend that $550 on a new lens.

That said, maybe I'm not a "serious photographer;" I don't make money from my photography. I do have ~20,000 images, though, and a tool to organize and finish them is nice to have.

I bought Lightroom 3, only to abandon it. I downloaded Lightroom 4, only to abandon it as well.

I just don't get it really. I use the Adobe CS products for more than just photography, so maybe that's why I don't see the value. Other than the speed which it finds and catalogs my photos, I find it confusing and limited (feature-wise). It also automatically pops up whenever I insert a USB stick, external HD, or CD, whether or not that device/storage has pictures on it. I also hate how it wants to automatically organize my file system. Stop that!!

It doesn't even do facial recognition, which would be the #1 reason for me to buy it. I use Picasa to find pictures of people, and that's free!

Better RAW handling? Isn't that same engine in Photoshop? If you're a serious photographer, wouldn't you already have this?

I guess if they sped up Bridge most would have zero reason to use it.

I consider myself a fairly serious amateur photographer, and I find lightroom to be much better for developing many photos quickly compared to photoshop. A lot of the tools available in photoshop are not needed for day to day rendering of RAW files, while Lightroom brings those tools and adjustments that are needed into the open vs being hidden in various dialog boxes in photoshop. It also lets me easily publish my photos to either of my flickr accounts or to facebook with a simple drag and drop, and will update those photos if i make changes to them in the future. It does all the things picasa does and more, but better, faster, and with greater control. If all you are doing is touching up photos from RAW for publishing then Lightroom has everything you need. If you're doing all kinds of cosmetic stuff like a fashion magazine might do then photoshop comes into play, but at that point you're probably spending several hours working on one photo that will take up a full page or a cover.

Lightroom 4 is awesome, and what I've seen of CS6 which will be coming... soon... is awesome. Adobe has made tremendous strides over the past few years rethinking the way they do things. Realizing that battling for "Flash dominance of the web" was a losing battle. Lowering prices, a la Lightroom. Really pushing forward with Premiere Pro (6 is awesome!) and doing things like acquiring SpeedGrade, which is HUGE for video people. The new application Prelude, which is a great logging tool for video people. Photoshop 6, which will now support the Mercury Engine. So much good stuff. I am a reseller/VAR of theirs (and many other vendors in the media technology space) and Adobe went from being totally MEH on all levels, to one of my favorite companies and partners. I LOVE it when companies manage to turn themselves around, especially big companies, because the bigger you are, the harder it is to turn around the ship. Apple did it, Adobe did it. Hell, even Microsoft seems to be able to bust out some decent software these days! It's a really good time to be a technologist!

I should add, anyone who doesn't understand why Lightroom 4 is a CRAZY AWESOME STEAL for $149 is, well, out of their mind, and/or simply has no idea why many photographers, amateur and pro alike, shoot RAW files. RAW is like a digital negative, and you can "develop" it in many ways, to do all sorts of fun/wild stuff. Turn color to black and white, in many ways. Change exposure post-facto. Selectively modify colors in a practically infinite number of ways. It is a HUGE HUGE tool. I'm pretty new to digital photography of a more technical sort, and I've been having a BLAST starting to learn about RAW processing and Lightroom. It's so damn cool I had a DREAM about Lightroom last night, after downloading v4 at 12:45am or thereabouts. It's so worth $149, I can't even describe. I bought a couple of fast 32GB SD cards recently for my on-order Nikon D800 DSLR, and they were almost that much EACH! Lightroom is probably the single most essential software tool for any serious digital photographer who shoots RAW, and the fact that for $149 it can be yours, is HUGE. If you are shooting RAW, $149 is like, the least-expensive thing in your workflow.

one reason why I love Lightroom and will get this upgrade, is the license allows for it to be installed on 2 computers, and they can be either Mac _or_ Windows ( from http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop ... m/faq.html ) I wish the Creative Suite license was the same, but unfortunately CS has to be installed on the same OS on each of the two machines you're allowed to activate it on.